When you create a setting for a game, it's important to resist the temptation to just pile everything on, like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You want the world to seem appealing and inviting, but you don't want things to become so complex that it starts to seem like a genre-mixing super hero team. Some great tastes do not taste great together.
A good example is the introduction of new sentient races. Supplements and expansions do this all the time, and it gets to be annoying, because it effectively involves a massive act of retroactive continuity.
"Oh, did we forget to tell you? Our planet also supports a highly sophisticated species of sentient cat people, who are well enough integrated into human society to speak our language and basically share our same technology, social structure, and pop culture."
I don't know about you, but if I were walking down the street and suddenly encountered someone made out of living crystal or a bipedal dinosaur wearing a hoodie and buying a soda from the machine next to Wal*Mart, the least likely possible explanation I could think of would be that the Earth has however supported a separate humanoid species for the 10 million years or so we'd both been evolving, and that not only had we not killed each other off competing for resources, but I'd never bumped into them before that moment. But that's the basically the explanation we're given for the introduction into the storyline of swanmays, minotaurs, dragonborn, Eladrin, gnomes, pixies, nagas, or whatever they're coming up with now in the popular RPG's.
This sort of stuff needs to be decided ahead of time. At least Tolkien made an effort to explain how the gods created the various races, and that orcs go into hibernation and can survive buried underground for thousands of years until mortal memory of them is forgotten. But then, most fantasy is a far cry from Tolkien.
No comments:
Post a Comment